A MANAGEMENT DISCIPLINE OF SOFTWARE METRICS AND THE SOFTWARE QUALITY MANAGER

Abstract

A management discipline of software metrics facilitates their consistent measurement and usage during the life cycle of software systems, by maintaining knowledge and data related to their evaluation tasks and application domain knowledge. To investigate environment of the management discipline, we represent software engineering environments by an activity flow model and a micro cycle model. A unified management view of software metrics is established by their collectivity and comprehensiveness in two-dimensional flows of the activity flow model. Then, we propose the Software Quality Manager (SQM) as a realization of the management discipline of software metrics. The proposed software quality manager makes use of two knowledge bases: (1) knowledge about application domain in the form of reusable software components and (2) knowledge about software engineering. The three-stage architecture and preparation process of the proposed system are also presented. Finally, we propose how to support the measurement and analysis task for database management systems within the context of the software quality manager.